Harry Pollitt was a boilermaker by training who would spend more than two decades at the helm of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Yet, by 1925, when he first came into Max’s life, he was merely a rising star of the Left. Although capable of fantastic hatred, Pollitt was a warm and persuasive speaker. As the Labour politician Michael Foot later said, ‘lots of people who were not Communists couldn’t help liking him’. This was one of the reasons why, in March 1925, Harry Pollitt had been lined up to speak at a protest in Liverpool organised by the Communist Party.
After finishing work the day before his speech, Pollitt travelled to Euston Station and caught the 5.55 p.m. train to Liverpool. It was the opening move in the most unusual journey of his life. One of the train’s last scheduled stops was at Edgehill, where four men approached Pollitt’s carriage and, to his amazement, manhandled him out of the train. A fellow passenger, who had been sitting across from Pollitt since London, rather than intervene, actually helped these men to remove him. Evidently he was part of their gang.
‘I was dragged to the barrier, struggling violently,’ Pollitt recalled, in his booming Lancastrian baritone.1 ‘The barrier is a narrow one, but on this occasion the gates were wide open and no ticket was asked for – the collector had been told that a dangerous lunatic from London might give trouble. I was hustled into a car and driven away.’ One of his kidnappers remembered it differently, explaining in court, to the delight of the gallery, that he and his accomplices had removed Pollitt from the train ‘gently, rather like getting hold of a man who refuses to come and have a drink, but who wants to go’.2
Harry Pollitt was then driven to a nearby hotel and held overnight. The next day he was released, once there was no prospect of him making it to Liverpool in time for his speech. The young Communist was also made to endure a series of impromptu lectures from his abductors on the perils of Marxism: the men who had bundled him off the train were Fascists. They belonged to the Liverpool section of K, the paramilitary group with Max and Joyce at its heart.
Though Pollitt’s kidnappers were later arrested and appeared in court, key details of his abduction remained obscure, including the identity of the fifth man involved, or how the kidnappers knew which train Pollitt had taken and the carriage he was in.
What did emerge, however, was that on the morning of the kidnap a call had come in to the organisation that had arranged for Pollitt to speak in Liverpool. The caller had asked which train Pollitt was planning to take. Given that it was Max’s job to supply K with intelligence, the unidentified man on the phone was probably him. It is also possible that Max was the passenger who shared a compartment with Pollitt up from London and who had alerted the waiting Fascists to his whereabouts on the train, probably by holding something out of his window as they pulled in to Edgehill station.
Nobody in K had ever attempted a stunt like this before. It was more brazen than any earlier operation and far more aggressive. Given his new desire for revenge and his intelligence role in K, it is probable that Max was the man behind this. His involvement in the next set of K attacks on the Communists, on the other hand, is beyond any doubt.
In the early hours of 2 May, 1925, less than two months after the Pollitt kidnapping, Maxwell Knight and several other young Fascists climbed onto the roof of the local Communist Party headquarters in Glasgow. There, they smashed through the skylight and clambered into the loft. At this point one of them produced a saw and began to carve a hole in the floor. Once this had been done, the raiding party jumped down into the offices below, where they went berserk.
Max and the other men upended furniture, threw papers around and went off with all the important documents that they could find. They left the place, as the police report put it, ‘in a great state of confusion’.3
Less than two weeks after this first burglary, Max and his men broke in to the same Glasgow office again. This time they did not bother shattering the skylight. They forced the main door instead. As well as trashing the place, as they had done previously, the Fascists sprayed black ink over the Communists’ political banners and stole as much literature as they could carry.
Nine days later, amazingly, Max and two accomplices returned to the same spot for a third time. It was late on a Friday night. Again, they wrecked the office, chucking around ink and gathering as much sensitive paperwork as they could, but just as one of the burglars left the building, at about three in the morning, he bumped into a policeman.
The man who had just stumbled out of the local Communist Party headquarters was an unemployed ex-serviceman called Joseph McCall. When asked what he was up to, McCall explained that he had been working late in the Communist office and had decided to take home one or two books. This was where his story fell apart.
McCall was carrying 20 books, 266 typewritten circulars and 76 books of lottery tickets. The offices he had just left resembled ‘a scene of desolation’, according to one reporter.4 This was after Max, McCall and one other man had spent roughly two hours in there. ‘I have never seen such wreckage,’ the reporter went on, ‘not since the air raids, at least!’ McCall was arrested. Max and his other accomplice had managed to get away.
These raids may have represented Max’s first taste of burglary, yet by no means his last. Years later an MI5 colleague described him as one of the few officers who would not hesitate to burgle premises without authority. Indeed, it is striking just how many of the men and women who worked under Max acquired a similar penchant for breaking and entering. It was clearly something of a speciality for him.
The Glasgow raids were widely reported, partly because of their ferocity. Communists had been known to raid Fascist offices in the past, but not like this. The devastation carried out inside these rooms did not resemble a straightforward burglary so much as an impassioned reprisal.
Max would later describe the ‘latent spark of aggression’ in ‘the breasts of creatures of the private inquiry world’.5 It seemed that another side of his character had momentarily slipped out. In the Pollitt kidnap and the Glasgow raids there was a hint of his shadow self, of Max the black sheep of the family, Max the frustrated exhibitionist, Max the young man whose brother had died on the Western Front and who had volunteered for active service but had seen none, Max the political activist who now wanted revenge for what had apparently happened to his comrade William Joyce. At the same time, not that anybody in the Makgill Organisation was concerned about this, it was becoming harder to believe that Max was merely playing the part of an enthusiastic Fascist. Instead these seemed to be the actions of a willing warrior in the war against international Communism.
These raids can also be seen as an expression of Max’s growing stature within the Makgill Organisation. He had become more confident, perhaps as a result of his new role.
Having been taken on as an agent, Max was now operating as a spymaster as well. Aged just twenty-five, Maxwell Knight was running his own stable of agents. Most likely, he had begun to build up his agent network after being installed as Director of Intelligence at the British Fascisti. At first he recruited friends and acquaintances as agents, but as his self-belief grew, he had started to take on strangers. He found some recruits by placing small advertisements in newspapers. One of these appeared in the Sussex Agricultural Express, in late 1923, and called enigmatically for anyone ‘interested in patriotic work of a definite character’.6
Each of these approaches to a potential agent took imagination, subtlety and some courage. Befriending or chatting up a stranger is hard enough. Asking one to become a spy, who reports to you, is considerably more daunting. With no formal instruction Max was learning the rudiments of espionage through trial and error, and he was doing so at incredible speed. In January 1925, Max was able to tell Don, his spymaster at the Makgill Organisation, that he had recently ‘secured information of some value from 52 sources’.7 About thirty of these, he went on, could be classed as agents of his, and ten ‘deliver reports fairly regularly or are employed to investigate special cases’.
He had also managed to recruit at least one Communist student and – his greatest achievement by that point – he had taken six men from the ranks of the British Fascisti and played each of them into the Communist Party. One of these infiltrators may have been Joseph McCall, the ex-serviceman who had helped him in the most recent Glasgow raid, and who had been a Fascist before he joined the Communists. Losing the services of McCall after his arrest might have left Max blind to what was going on in Glasgow Communist circles, yet by then he seems to have had another man on the inside. This second agent was probably a BF member before Max convinced him to join the Communist Party on his behalf. Later codenamed M/5, this second Scottish agent became a keen collector of antique weaponry and would work as a factory gun examiner. He was still reporting to Max from deep inside the Communist movement at the start of the Second World War.
Identifying, recruiting and running just one of these penetration agents required patience and finesse, as well as consistently sound judgement. To have six of them on the go suggested an unusual talent. Almost every element of Max’s early career as a spymaster was remarkable. It was unheard of for a twenty-five-year-old with no training and limited resources to build up and run such a large web of informants. Agent running seemed to come naturally to him, in the way that looking after wild creatures had done. But his confidence around animals and his ability as a spymaster were not just gifts he had inherited unwittingly. These two skills informed and complemented each other, and were rooted in Max’s capacity for hard work and his willingness to fail.
Other spymasters might spend months building up to their first approach to a potential agent, yet within his first year Max had made as many as fifty approaches. He was honing his tradecraft through endless repetitions, giving himself the space to fail, learn and try again. The same could be said of the way he handled animals. As a child he had spent thousands of hours with an improbable array of different creatures, sometimes getting it wrong, but almost always learning from his mistakes. Endless practice does not guarantee success, but it helps.
No less important was the way he grasped early on what would become the most important lesson of his career as a spymaster, one that emerges from the reminiscences many years later of an agent who was taken on by Max at around this time.
In early 2014, MI5 released several files that would shed light for the first time on the story of a brilliant wartime British agent known as ‘Jack King’. Posing as a Gestapo officer, this man had infiltrated a number of extremist right-wing groups in Britain during the Second World War. When these MI5 files were first released, the identity of this ‘genius’ agent was a mystery. After much speculation, most of it wrong, it emerged that ‘Jack King’ was in fact Eric Roberts, a humble bank clerk who had been working at Westminster Bank when he was pulled out of his job by MI5. His manager at the time had been suitably perplexed.
‘What we would like to know here is – what are the particular and especial qualifications of Mr Roberts which we have not been able to perceive – for some particular work of national importance?’8
This seemed to be one of those inspiring wartime stories in which a modest English amateur is plucked from obscurity and goes on to perform heroics for his country, after which he or she returns to an ordinary life after the war. But that is not what happened.
By the outbreak of war in 1939, Eric Roberts, the self-effacing bank clerk, had in fact been an undercover agent for almost half of his adult life. It began, for him, when he was recruited to the Makgill Organisation in the early 1920s by Maxwell Knight.
Max had met Eric Roberts for the first time either in late 1923 or early 1924. Roberts was a precocious seventeen-year-old from Cornwall who had come up to London to start a new job at the Westminster Bank. Wanting to make new friends, ‘Robbie’, as Roberts was known, decided to join the British Fascisti, which was how he had met Max. The young spymaster recognised in Roberts the qualities that already he had come to cherish in a prospective agent, that mercurial blend of intelligence, industry, modesty, humour, patriotism and unfulfilled ambition. Just weeks after Roberts had joined the BF, Max persuaded him to resign from this group and infiltrate the Communist Party instead.
Max had unearthed a gem. Eric Roberts would go on to be one of the most successful penetration agents of his generation, infiltrating by his own account seventeen different extremist groups. He had a long and impressive career in the field, yet he never forgot his first assignment as one of Max’s agents.
Roberts had been told by Max to gatecrash a Communist meeting that was due to be addressed by Maxim Litvinov, the Soviet Union’s roving ambassador. Max’s teenage agent arrived at the venue, strode into the room and took a seat. His heart must have been pounding uncomfortably as he began to make mental notes of who was there, the positions they appeared to hold, who was speaking to whom and what Litvinov said, before scurrying off at the end to scribble it all down ‘with a leaky fountain pen’.9 He passed on his first report to Max. As Roberts recalled, ‘M. K. was delighted.’
Why had this bright young Cornishman agreed to do this? His reasons were in some ways political. Eric Roberts had joined the BF because he saw Communism as a threat. Another lure was the familiar and intoxicating romance of being a spy, or at least the idea of being a spy. As a boy, Roberts had repeatedly read Kim, Rudyard Kipling’s classic espionage novel, and it was this book, he explained, that ‘set my mind working in the direction of intelligence’.10 Just as Max had been obsessed by the novels of John Buchan, Roberts had fallen in love at an early age with the labyrinthine possibilities of an undercover life, and this inoculated him against some of its initial hardships. The other reason he was prepared to risk being exposed as a Fascist spy and beaten up by a gang of Communists had to do with his spymaster.
In most descriptions of the way Max ran his agents there are allusions to the strange hold he appeared to have on them, his ‘Pied Piper nature’, which ‘attracted many to become agents out of personal loyalty’.11 There is a hint of this in Eric Roberts’s recollection. The Cornishman explained, a little gnomically, that the best way to understand his relationship with Max was by reading Kim, a book in which the eponymous hero becomes the disciple of a charismatic Tibetan lama. Roberts mentioned Max’s ‘personal magnetism’.12 Another called him ‘an almost mystical figure’.13 It was as if Max could cast a spell over some of his operatives, and that just as he had ‘the gift’ when handling pets he inspired a preternatural loyalty from his agents.
Yet there was no magic here. The key to Max’s appeal was to do with the way he treated his operatives. Throughout his career he went to unusual lengths to discern the individual character of each and to make him or her feel special. ‘Every good agent likes to think that his officer is almost exclusively concerned with him, and with him alone,’ as Max once explained, ‘even though the agent may know perfectly well that the officer has others with whom he deals.14 This is a definite and illogical kink in human nature, but it is a kink which must be fostered by any officer who is going to make a success of this work.’ Here was the artifice at the heart of his craft. Max had learned early on that to be a successful spymaster he must exploit this essential weakness in the nature of his agents and build up in each an almost exaggerated sense that he was interested in them, only them and nobody else.
The need for anyone running agents to make their charges feel special, to flatter and pamper them with attention, might sound obvious today. In 1924, it was not. British spymasters did not routinely shower their informants with praise or go out of their way to make them feel unique. Government agents were more often seen as men and women of dubious morals. They were ‘police spies’, and for many Britons this was a contradiction. The police were there to help in a crisis and be visible, transparent and straightforward. Spies were not.
The British military men who found themselves running spies in the 1920s may not have been in the habit of doting on their agents as if they were fascinating pets. Max was different. He had what Graham Greene called ‘the human factor’. ‘He gave tremendous support to the agents,’ one colleague observed.15 ‘He really cared about them as people.’ Even at the age of twenty-five Max understood that a recruitment is a seduction, and that the onus must always be on the spymaster to make his agent feel singular and special, not the other way around.
By the summer of 1925, Maxwell Knight was in a powerful position. He had in play a small army of devoted agents, and he had learned a lot about how to keep them productive and safe. Their intelligence was also starting to make a difference politically. Increasingly, K, the paramilitary group Max belonged to, was taking the fight to the Communists. It seemed to be getting away with it, too.
Although members of K were occasionally arrested, the punishments they received were surprisingly mild. The four men prosecuted for Pollitt’s kidnap were defended brilliantly in court and found ‘Not Guilty’. Max’s accomplice in Glasgow, Joseph McCall, was sentenced to just seven days in prison or a £3 fine. As well as getting off lightly, some members of K had the strange belief that the authorities approved of what they were doing. McCall even told the court that the police had known about his undercover activities before his arrest. ‘In the strictest confidence,’ wrote one of Pollitt’s kidnappers, unaware that his letter would later be published, ‘I can inform you that the Police and Government and all concerned are on our side.’16
These men appeared to be suffering from baroque delusions of grandeur, except that they were not. The four men behind the kidnapping of Harry Pollitt were represented in court by Sir Henry Curtis-Bennett, KC, a former MI5 officer whose military commission in the last war had been arranged by Admiral Hall, Chairman of the Economic League. One of Max’s colleagues in Glasgow, a man called J. McGuirk Hughes, who also worked for the Makgill Organisation, had in the past been given money by Special Branch and the temporary command of several policemen.
K was a dangerous, right-wing paramilitary group responsible for burglary, kidnapping and violence. It was rumoured to have ‘a store of arms’ hidden somewhere in London.17 But MI5 did not class this outfit as a threat. Instead, K, by then ‘one of London’s most influential secret societies’,18 was described blandly in one MI5 report as a ‘well organised and efficient’ organisation responsible for ‘some quite good work from an intelligence point of view’.19
This sounds like a chronically inept assessment. Stranger still, MI5 was more suspicious of K’s parent organisation, the British Fascisti, insisting that no ‘members of H. M. Forces should have any connection with the Fascisti’,20 a society that was not ‘desirable in this country’,21 whose members ‘bring discredit by their methods on all who really wish to maintain law and order’.22 It was as if MI5 had confused the tearaway K with the much more benign BF. But there was an explanation for all this. Right at the heart of K was a man whom they could trust.